Part 1

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“I think they’re sacrificing them,” she’d said once we had all gotten together on those ice cold stumps behind the school for a smoke. “That’s why the cops don’t come. That’s why the newspapers don’t run any stories. That’s why no one fucking talks about our town after they leave. If everyone that’s lived here all their lives knows you have to stay asleep, there’s no one to take. So they need new people to come. They need people for the spiders to take.”

“So what do we do?”

That was the question, right? What do we do? Honestly, I wish I would have posted here earlier. Right around when we started to talk about doing something about this would’ve been helpful and saved some of the suffering you guys are about to see. But I'm a slow writer, and by Christmas Eve it felt like I was staring down the barrel of a gun. I didn’t know if I’d make it out alive, and it felt like someone had to know what was going on outside of our little town before we walked into Hell. Mostly it was just nice to get some outside support. To know that we’re not crazy. That what’s going on is as fucked as we think it is.

And uh yeah, I still thinks It’s a Wonderful Life is a shit movie. Sorry. I’m doubling down on that. When you spend your whole life using it as a marker for ‘pills are next’ it starts to lose its charm. Ella thinks I’m a shithead too for saying it sucks, if that’s any consolation.

Some of you guys were wondering about Thanksgiving in October. I live in Canada, it’s just a different holiday here. I have cousins in Detroit that hype American Thanksgiving like it’s some crazy event. I think I’m going to join them.

-

“So what do we do? We can’t just let it happen to them!”

I can tell you the moment Ella started talking about it we all groaned and shut down.

“Not the Christmas spiders again,” moaned Greg. Frankly none of us were really into talking about the Christmas spiders again. Not after Halloween. Certainly not while stoned. Max just heaved a sigh and put the freshly rolled joint back in his little stash case. He closed it, patted it, and then sat back. I zipped up my coat even tighter. Ella, meanwhile, was fuming.

“Oh I’m sorry! Am I ruining your pretend world of cheer?! The town is sacrificing people on CHRISTMAS!”

I cringed, glancing over at Max who quickly shook his head and dipped his chin. Ella was fired up. She got this way any time she found a cause to roar about. Last year it was overseas dog adoption. The year before that was her rally cry against GMO farming. It went all the way back to the fourth grade and her science fair project on microplastics. To be fair, I don’t think she’d ever actually been really wrong in the past. All the topics were worth talking about. She just terrified us in the process.

“In two weeks we all go to sleep and have a nice Christmas while the Millers get dragged out of bed by four legged freaks! And you’re all just okay with that?”

“Of course not!”

There were objections all around until we heard Greg mumbling. Ella towered over him while he focused on his gloves. “Well?”

“…I said it’s all just devil worship anyways,” he mumbled a little louder after clearing his throat. “That’s what my parents said.”

“Oh hell no! You told your parents?!”

Now it was my turn to be worked up. If we hadn’t all known him since kindergarten I think we would’ve strung him up the power lines from his shoes. Rule Number One: You don’t tell your parents! Rule Number Two: You don’t tell Greg’s weirdo religious freak parents!

“They found my candy okay! I was pissed!”

Apparently shortly after Halloween Greg’s mother had been going through his room when a fun-sized candy wrapper triggered an all-out scrub of the premises. She found the bag of pamphlets, still full, and worse than that, found the rest of his candy haul. In the massive argument that followed Greg had thrown out the only weapon he had: that they drugged him on Christmas Eve. They didn’t talk for days. His parents prayed and he relished in the silence until they came with bibles in hand and sat him down for a reckoning. The town was evil, we were all devil worshipers, and they did what they had to in order to keep the family safe.

“Why don’t they like, just move then?” Max asked after Greg rambled out their speech about ‘straying from God’. “They don’t have to live here.”

“I asked them that too. They didn’t really answer. We’re not doing Christmas this year though. It’s ‘too pagan’.”

“Serves you right,” Ella scoffed, taking her stump again. “Jackass.”

“Whatever, I’m not supposed to hang out with you guys anyways!” Greg got up and stomped off. We were all upset. So much so that after Greg left, so did the rest of us. The impromptu meeting on the Christmas spiders died before it really got off the ground.

The comments about devil worship though? That stuck with me.

I went home and went straight for my room, grabbing Rosie’s notebook I’d hidden away. I hadn’t looked through it yet. I hadn’t wanted to. Finding out the truth had been so exhausting that I was pretty game to just take my ‘magic pill’ and pretend I had no idea why we did it and just go to sleep on Christmas Eve as usual. Then I could move away next year and never come back. Unfortunately, Ella had a point. There was something totally fucked up about the way our town handled Christmas. Now that we knew, and could practically see them serving this new family up on a plate? It felt gross. It wasn’t just scary. It felt fundamentally morally wrong.

Before Rosie gave me the notebook she’d made a comment that the spiders weren’t anything ‘holy’. Thinking about what Greg’s parents had said, I started to wonder. The town we live in is basically an old mining community. We have a whole shitty wannabe museum dedicated to the town’s history. I’d been there dozens of times on school field trips. Some random guy back in the day staked his claim in the woods and wouldn’t you know it, founded a mine nearby with a nice rich deposit of coal. There were coal seams out the ass. He got wealthy and built the town. Decades later oil drills started coming into the area. That’s who provides half of the jobs here, the oil company. People definitely don’t leave this place because there’s no money in the area.

For the first time I started to think that it was maybe weird how financially well off the town is. We don’t even have homeless people. That’s strange, right? I thought about my parents. My mom is a florist. My dad repairs radios. When my sister was born, they both took like… a year off work. I’ve spent enough time on reddit to know that’s not normal.

I thought about my friend Max. He’s into music. He’s seventeen and probably has like ten thousand dollars’ worth of music equipment. He’s got turn tables, amps, guitars, everything. But he lives with his retired grandparents. Everyone in Ella’s family plays sports. Lots of sports. They travel for games and have the best of everything. All our school teams have the best of everything. Greg’s parents too. They have multiple cars and the fanciest yard in the city. It’s no wonder they refuse to move. They could judge the town all they wanted but they were living off of the sins just the same.

I looked at my iPhone, my MacBook, the consoles in the corner, my widescreen TV, and a closet full of Nikes. With shame, it dawned on me that this wasn’t normal.

I finally took a deep breath and cracked open the cover of Rosie’s notebook. I did a quick flip through and then started at the top. You could tell she’d taped and rebound the thing multiple times over the years. Photos, drawings, newspaper snippets, and pages from other books had been stapled, taped, and glued in wherever they fit. Amidst all that were her notes: scrawling loops of annotations in corners, and what looked like the pages of a diary. Her diary. The diary she kept while she tried to discover the town’s horrible holiday secret.

December 2nd, 1962

I came back. I said I’d never come back, but here I am. Dad’s sick. The cancer has taken hold of him and Mom said this might be his last Christmas, so I came back. Anne said Daddy’s eyes just lit up when Mom told him I was coming home for Christmas. It feels so strange being back. I almost forgot how wonderful this place feels when you’re here. The snow. The happy faces. The way they decorate every street to the nines and put up that big beautiful spruce in the town square. I have never figured out where they get such a big tree from! Standing beneath it I feel like a little girl again.

December 10th, 1962

Mom invited Stewart Walsh over to ‘bake cookies’. Can you believe her? That woman just does not know how to mind her own business! Suddenly she gets ‘light-headed’ and has to ‘sit down’ so I’m the one stuck rolling out the cookie dough with him. I’m embarrassed FOR her! Although I hate to admit it (and I will NOT tell her), it was nice to see him again. It’s been years. He finally grew into his ears!

December 24th, 1962

I’m having trouble breathing. All I can think of is what’s to come. We hung up the stockings as usual and I put up George’s. Mom always makes us put up George’s stocking. Every time I touch that thing all I can think of is that night and the way he screamed. I hate her. I hate her for making me do this. What if I wake up? I shouldn’t have come back.

December 12th, 1965

I’m so nervous. I don’t know why I let that man convince me to stay in this town. I had my chance to leave! Now I’m here with a newborn and Christmas is coming. Mom gave me her recipe to put the baby to sleep. She said the physician suggested it when I was that age and it never failed her. God. Am I really going to do this?

December 26th, 1984

John’s dead. He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.

I’ve failed him. I’ve failed all my children. I should have never stayed in this horrid place. I should have made Stewart move with me back to Toronto. Every time he visited with me he loved it. But that man has a way of sweet talking me. Spun me a romantic story about raising our kids where we grew up. Small town values. What bullshit. I fell for the oldest trick in the book and now my son is gone. My baby. My sweet baby. My baby’s gone. I’ll never forgive myself for this for as long as I live.

June 28th, 1987

Well I did it. Today I put my big girl panties on and I did it. No one wanted me there. I don’t think anyone’s wanted me in this town since John died. I’m a ‘troublemaker’ because I talk about It. Kicked out of the Garden Society. Kicked out of the PTA. Well, they have to take me. I’m a tax paying citizen. I’m owed my right to speak. So at today’s town hall I let everyone jaw on about their bake sales and their Canada Day plans and then I stood up and let them have it. “Why do we allow our family to die on Christmas Eve?” Diary you should have seen their faces! Stricken! The lot of them! I went down the line. Listed the names of everyone in that room who had someone stolen on Christmas Eve. Asked them how they liked their empty coffins! I even turned around and asked the mayor if he was willing to donate someone to the cause this year. After all, the town stands there and does nothing! The mayor’s practically co-signing it. Oh I was escorted out. But it was worth it.

September 15th, 1990

Allison moved out today. She’s starting her new life. After we dropped her off at the airport, we went straight for the hardware store. I wanted this done years ago but Stewart wanted to wait until the kids were gone, so it didn’t make them uncomfortable. Tonight he blocks up the chimney. Those soulless vultures will never step foot in this home again.

December 25th, 1990

IT WORKED! Oh the neighbours gave us the hairy eye when they saw Stewart hauling cement to the roof, but he never stopped. If ever the town gossiped about us before they did it double time the moment we shut that hellhole up. Probably tripled when we barred the windows! Stewart’s friend is a physician. We did it right. Tested it for weeks. Figured out just how much we need to inject to go to sleep quickly and not meet God. Sounds crazy, but you need a backup plan. Then, on Christmas Eve, we drew the curtains and waited. Once the sound started I just about turned into a teenager again. I shook so bad the bed vibrated! Stewart had to hold me in place. We heard them on the roof. Crawling around like the vermin they are. Then they tried the chimney. Oh they scratched around like cats in the dirt! Then they just… moved on. Left. Later we heard the distant screams of someone not asleep. I don’t know if we’ll stay up every year. I don’t think I can handle hearing the poor souls as they take them. But I feel a sense of peace knowing they won’t come into my home ever again!

January 18th, 1991

We’re pariahs now. Well, mostly me. Stewart still has his friends. No one wants to talk to me. They blame me for ‘influencing’ him. Stewart stands up for me. No one will say anything in front of him, but I hear it. Whispers. Gossip. We’re ‘selfish’. ‘Hurting the town.’ The town already took too much from me. They can suffer. I won’t play this game anymore.

There were dozens more entries. I wrote out the ones that seemed to be the most interesting. Rosie’s husband died just a couple years later. With him gone, the only way to get any work done in her home was to hire someone outside of the town. No one said hello. No one visited. There were no casseroles when she was sick. No one to mow her lawn. Reading Rosie’s diary, I learned just how cruel our town could be. We were probably the first people to go visit her in years.

I brought the notebook with me the next day when I dragged Ella out to the town square. I wanted to see the tree. The town still put up a gigantic tree every Christmas. I’d stopped going but my parents still dragged my sister there every year. Honestly, everyone sort of dragged themselves there every year. The lighting of the tree was a big event that kicked off the whole Christmas season.

“People are jerks,” Ella said, reading while we walked. “It looks like people left letters in her mail slot for years. That’s how she got all this. No one would talk to her but she was the only one they could tell.” I elbowed her and we both came to a halt, looking up at the heavily decorated Christmas tree just a few feet in front of us. How the hell did they manage to decorate that much tree? It must have had hundreds of ornaments on it.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, in awe for a moment, before her face fell. “Christmas isn’t the same, is it?” I shook my head. No it wasn’t. It would never be the same.

I spotted a worker adjusting the garland on a light post nearby. “Hey – the tree looks awesome!” The man beamed with pride. I could feel the bile rise in my throat. “Where do you guys get such a huge tree? It’s massive!”

“Raully’s Tree Farm!” he announced with a grin. “Best trees in the country!”

It didn’t take long to google maps up the location of Raully’s Tree Farm. Ella and I went to get Max (Greg wasn’t talking to us) and borrow his truck for the forty minute drive out of town. The tree farm itself didn’t seem like a regular farm so much as a big ass forest surrounded by fence. A fading billboard with a chipmunk dressed as Santa announced our arrival. I guess that was Raully.

“Wait, stop,” Ella said as we got out. She dug around in her bag before pulling out a wrapped bundle of sage and a lighter. “My grandma gave this to me. I’m supposed to use it when I feel like the energy is off. The energy is definitely off here.” She lit the bundle until it smoked then started to swirl it around herself before motioning me over.

I paused, not really big on superstitions. “Isn’t that bad for our lungs?” I asked. Ella looked at me like I was nuts. It probably wasn’t a great argument all considering. Max shoved me aside and held his arms out.

“Fuck man, Ella’s Nan is like, 100% Native American. I’m like, trusting the old lady. Load me up.”

Max stood there relishing in his own spiritual experience until Ella pointed the lighter at me. “Fine,” I muttered, stepping forward and letting her blow the smoke on me. I don’t even know why I balked. We were at a tree farm on the trail for the truth about people stealing Christmas spiders. I probably needed to bathe in the stuff morning, noon and night.

After ‘getting right’ we walked around outside of the fence, searching for a way in. The giant chipmunk hadn’t indicated any business hours, so it didn’t seem like it was the type of place people just went to buy a tree. I figured they must have wholesaled to those tree sellers you see in parking lots. They were the Spirit Halloween of Christmas. That and Hickory Farms. Eventually we found a gate. It was locked, with a big chain looped around it. I pulled on the lock.

“Oh that’s secure,” Max scoffed, yanking on the chain. The chain was so long that if you tugged the gate far enough you could just slide under and through. We all made our way through and started to trudge through the many rows of trees. We trudged. Threw a couple snowballs, laughed and joked. Then trudged some more. We kept hiking through trees, more trees, and even more trees.

“Where are the big trees?” Ella finally asked, saying what we were all thinking. We’d been walking through dozens of average looking trees for the last twenty minutes with no giants in sight. Not even a leftover stump. The tree farm was huge. If they grew giant trees like the one in our town square, I couldn’t see where. All you could see were what looked like hundreds of normal trees, packed with snow. There weren’t any workers. No sign of an office.

“Fuck!” Max broke our silence and chased it with what I can only describe as a shriek. Then he was gone. Ella and I panicked. One minute we were all turning and looking at the world of evergreen around us, the next, Max poofed.

“Hayden! Ella!”

We could hear him. Ella chased our footprints in the snow and started following his, stepping wide around each dragging footprint he had left behind. “Max!” she called, and I followed her. “Max!”

“I’m good!” Suddenly we saw his hand waving above the snowline. We got to the edge of… a cliff. Well, kind of. Max had fallen off the edge of some sort of sharp hill, which luckily wasn’t a drop to his death. Just an awkward drop out of view. Ella crouched down and I peered over the edge. He’d fallen into a fluffy snow pile and was laughing awkwardly, red in the face. “My grandma always says I need to look where I’m going more!” I couldn’t help but heave a big sigh of relief. Then Ella smacked me in the chest.

“Ow! Jesus why-oh.” She’d pulled her mitt off and was pointing. I followed her finger down to a huge clearing below. In the middle of it stood a giant spruce tree. It had to be eighty feet tall! “Do they even grow that big?” I wondered. “Hey!” Ella was over the edge Max fell off and jumping down the next one.

I got down beside Max and helped him up before reluctantly starting to follow Ella down the steep hill. Eventually we managed to scoot down the last part on our butts, but it was a cold and long climb, and I wasn’t looking forward to going back up.

“Like, how do they get these trees out of here?” Max asked, before nearly walking straight into a massive construction crane. Ella just groaned and I shook my head.

Beside the towering spruce was a wide stump left behind from what we assumed was the tree in our town square. I walked around it, counting my steps absently and watching Ella put her hand on it.

“It’s warm! It’s… pulsing.”

I joined her, putting both my palms on the leftover wood, feeling the strange warmth emanating from it. She was right, it was pulsing. I could feel the odd thwumph, thwumph, thwumph, that felt like it came from somewhere deeper. You couldn’t see it move, but you could feel it. Almost like a heartbeat.

“This one’s warm too!” Max was standing under the other tree, touching the bark. “Maybe that’s like, why there’s no snow here.” We looked around. A perfect circle had formed around the tree and the stump, going out maybe twenty feet. Despite the rest of the tree farm being packed with the thick white stuff, the ground around the giant tree and its lost brother was damp and bare, even green in places. Only the very top of the tree itself seemed to have snow pillowed on its branches.

“Whoops!” Max had been walking around the tree when he kicked something accidentally. Ella and I went over to check it out. Tucked beneath the tree on one side was a pile of… oranges? I crouched down and picked one up. There were oranges, nuts, a couple pomegranates and candy. “Uh guys, this is weird right?” Max held up an empty four liter jug of milk. We all stared at it. Who just left an empty jug of milk in a tree farm of all places?

“I think we should leave,” Ella said suddenly. She’d found the lid to the milk jug a few steps away and beside it was one of those bear shaped squeeze bottles of honey. It was empty, and like the lid to the milk, the opening was in shreds. “I don’t want to be here after dark. And we need to clean up.” I’d never heard her sound so panicked before. I was confused but I wasn’t about to argue, and both Max and I helped her put the fruit and nuts back. We made the pile as neat as we could before we started back up the hill.

The climb absolutely sucked. Getting down had been easy. Getting back up was a nightmare. The snow was knee deep in some places and we never knew where the ground really was. It took the three of us dragging each other across the snow for a full hour to climb back up to the main tree farm. By time we crossed that final ledge, I felt my own sense of panic growing. I’d turn around and see nothing behind us but that didn’t stop it from feeling like something was just waiting for one of us to fall. I don’t think we even stopped to catch our breath until we got in the truck and were driving away.

Back in town, we stopped at Joe’s Place, a little diner with a clear view of the tree in town square. We ordered burgers and milkshakes. When Max got up to go to the bathroom, Ella pulled out Rosie’s notebook. She flipped through until she found an empty page at the back, then pulled out a pen and started sketching. I watched her draw the billboard, the clearing, and the spot where one tree stood and one tree was missing. She drew the little pile of stuff Max had kicked over, making a diagram of every item. Then she drew something else, on the tree still standing.

“What’s that?” I asked, struggling to really eat my food.

“You didn’t see?” she asked, and I shook my head while she frowned. “That tree was filled with spider webs.”

I didn’t sleep that night. Every time I felt like I was going to drift off, I’d feel my skin crawl, like a hundred little legs were brushing against me. It was all in my head of course, and at some point I must have slept because I woke up with a jolt the next day.

The idea that Greg told his parents about the whole ‘drugged on Christmas Eve’ thing had freaked us all out. The only good thing was that no one really likes Greg’s parents. I mean, they’re not bad people. They’re just really, really religious, the fire and brimstone kind, and it always seeps into every conversation. So while we were worried that they might start sharing with our parents, they never seemed to. After the tree farm, we waited until his parents were definitely at work to go knock on his door. If we were going to take this on, we needed all of us together. Thankfully, we’d been friends since elementary school. We knew Greg. Any time he got upset he needed a couple days to stew, and then he was cool. So when we filled him in on the tree farm, he was eager to join us in the town square.

We wanted a closer look at the tree.

“So my parents were right?” he asked, sounding as shocked as we were.

“Kind of,” I admitted with a shrug. “I think so anyways. I mean, can you explain how Mrs. Alps has run a store called the Button Emporium for twenty years in this place?” I couldn’t. No one bought that many buttons in this town. I think I saw my mother go in there once. I’d have guessed that she was selling buttons online but Mrs. Alps didn’t even seem to own a computer.

“Okay but have you ever seen anyone doing anything shady like that? It feels like we should be seeing people in robes, around a bonfire at midnight, that kind of stuff. Real cult shit.”

“We kinda do though,” Ella suggested as we came to the tree. “What happens at the start of every December?”

“Everyone comes to worship the tree,” I said, almost in a whisper. I thought about every Christmas I’d been alive for. At the start of December the town decorated the tree and everyone got together for the big light up. Hundreds of people gathered to clap for it. People sang carols. Passed around snacks. New parents introduced their babies to the tree like the fucking Lion King.

“I don’t see anything,” Ella announced, sounding disappointed as she made her way around the tree. Max had been checking too and shook his head. None of us found any spider webs. It was disappointing in a way.

“Uh, guys,” Greg called, waving an arm at us. “Guys!” He was tapping the notebook, looking like he’d seen a ghost. “Okay, you guys remember when I had my goth phase?” Oh we all remembered.

“Weren’t you like, really into Ozzy? You like, carried a plastic bat around.”

Middle school was a little weird for all of us I guess.

Greg rolled his eyes and shoved Max away. “Yeah-yeah, well, I was really into witchcraft and shit then. I wanted to piss my parents off. I got all these books on the occult, right? I actually read them. All of them. Most of it was really long and boring…”

“Speed it up man,” Ella said, spinning her finger in the air to which Greg shot her a dirty look.

“This, this stuff beneath the tree. This is one hundred percent an offering.”

We all exchanged looks. An offering?

“To fairies,” he hissed with eyes as wide as saucers. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Fairies now? Oh God. I was going to graduate school and get shipped straight to the loony bin. I might as well buy the jacket now.

“Just to be clear, like, Tinkerbelle bullshit?” I asked between chuckles. My little sister had dressed up as one for Halloween a couple years ago. It was cute. I couldn’t imagine how it had anything to do with the spiders though.

“No man. I mean real fairies. Every country has their own stories, right? They call them the ‘fae’, and they can be really fucked up. That pile of stuff? The milk and honey? That’s classic. That’s like the most basic shit you’d give.” By now people were staring at Greg’s arm waving so we hustled away.

“Okay, so why would Raully’s be making offerings to fairies?” I asked. “To grow big trees?”

“Nah man that would be a waste. Nature spirits and shit would take care of the trees.”

“He’s not wrong…” Ella mumbled, already on her phone. “Milk and honey is old school. It’s the first thing they suggest if you want to appease them or… make a deal.”

We all stopped. “A deal?” I asked. “What kind of deal?”

“The kind that like, runs a button shop?” Max pointed at the store we’d ended up in front of. Even though it was cold out, I felt beads of sweat dripping down my back. The Button Emporium. My mother’s flower shop. Ella’s mom was a real estate agent in a town that frankly, didn’t have a lot of buying and selling going on. Most of the houses that were empty were rentals owned by the town itself. The more I looked around and thought about it, the more fun-house vibes it gave off.

“You leave the offerings wherever the fae are said to live, like gardens, or fairy circles,” she read aloud, and then blanched. I thought about the circle of melted snow surrounding the spot where those two giant trees grew. That definitely had to be a fairy circle. Plus the trees were just weird. Warm and humming…

The trees.

I spun around and started jogging back to the town square. In that moment it was like the whole world faded around me. I could hear my friends calling me, but it was warped, like the sound came from underwater. All I could think of, all I could see, was that towering Christmas tree. It glittered under the weight of hundreds of ornaments, garland, and tinsel. I pushed past people as I made my way right to the tree, digging in my pocket for the one thing I knew could solve all of this: fire. In one smooth move I flicked open my lighter and held it up to the tree’s glistening branches. I could hear screaming behind me, people shrieking for help. I held fast, plunging the flame into the tree. I held out as long as I could before a security guard body slammed me into the ground.

It was embarrassing being picked up by my dad at the police station later that day. Even worse was listening to my dad and Ella’s Chief of Police father having a heart to heart. Then I had to watch him shake his head sadly at me as he unlocked the holding cell. The drive home was pure suffering. Lectures about what it means to be a man, about how community is important (please), and how I needed to set a good example for my sister. We got home and I heard everything again from my mother. Then I was sent to bed. I shut my door and put my headphones on. I didn’t want to listen to them debate about ‘what to do with me’. I felt sick enough as it was. All I could think about was that tree. It didn’t even get hot. It was like the flame just bent around it.